Naomi Watts Fan is your online guide to the talented and beautiful actress known for movies such as King Kong, Mulholland Drive, The Ring, and in the upcoming Ophelia. Here you can find information about the two time Oscar-nominee and all of her films, an extensive photo gallery and more.

When Naomi Watts’ son Sasha started fourth grade last year, he told his parents he wanted to start walking to school…alone. “Could he do it? Probably, yes,” says the actress. But “I’m not ready for that.”
“This is the age where they start building their autonomy,” says Watts, 48, who co-parents Sasha, 9, and son Kai, 8, with her former partner, actor Liev Schreiber, 49. The kids’ drive to learn and grow becomes more clear to her every day, she says. “They ask really intense, deep questions, like, ‘Who was the first person ever to be on Earth?’ and ‘Who was the mummy of the mummy of the mummy of the mummy?’ It sometimes just knocks me over, the deep level of thinking they go through.”
It’s a reminder to her that parenting regularly rides a fine line between nurturing your children’s independence and intelligence—and protecting them.
Watts’ character faces a similar quandary in her new movie, The Book of Henry, out June 16. She plays Susan, a divorced single mother raising her two boys. One of them, Henry (Jaeden Lieberher, 14, who co-starred in 2014’s St. Vincent with Watts and Bill Murray), is a bona fide genius. Henry handles his mom’s paycheck, invests in the stock market for his family and creates intricate plans in his notebook for Rube Goldberg–like machines with dozens of moving parts.
Susan’s younger son, Peter—played by Jacob Tremblay, 10, who starred alongside Oscar winner Brie Larson in Room—worships Henry but needs a bit more TLC. Their next door neighbor Christina (Maddie Ziegler, 14, of Lifetime’s Dance Moms) is being mistreated by her stepfather and needs the support of Susan’s family.
The challenges faced by the children present some serious topics.
“Right away it spoke to me,” Watts says of reading the Henry script. “It just felt like a fable, about how to keep a family together.”
Working with the child-heavy cast came easily for her. “Those kids, every day, were just incredible,” she says. It helped that she’d already co-starred with both boys: In addition to working with Lieberher in St. Vincent, she performed alongside Tremblay in last fall’s thriller Shut In.
Watts found her own youthful energy reawakened on set. “That’s the great thing about being a parent—kids bring out the child in you,” she says, “that spirit that should never go away.” And in her family, it hasn’t.
Her own children get the biggest laughs out of her when they’re busting her on her “fake” American accent if she’s using it on set between scenes. “They’re like, ‘Don’t speak like that!’’’ she says, laughing. “They just want you to be yourself.”
With a background like Watts’, being herself is complex. “I feel panicked when people ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ It’s complicated,” she explains. “I’m from everywhere!”
She was born in Kent, England. Her mother worked in fashion and dressing windows for department stores, then later in commercials and film, and is now an interior designer. Her father was a road manager and sound engineer for the band Pink Floyd.
“My mom and dad divorced early, and then he died,” she says of the tragedy that struck their family when she was only 7. “It was a struggle” for her mother, she says, “but she had the help of my grandparents—we lived with them for about three years.”
In those early years, “I was definitely a performer,” Watts says, recalling her involvement in local concerts, skits and holiday plays. At 14, she and her mom moved to Australia. She appeared in the 1986 Australian film For Love Alone, then relocated to the United States and made a name for herself in Hollywood with the movie Mulholland Dr., followed over the years by a wide range of other films, including The Ring, King Kong, The Impossible and Birdman.
In 2005, she began dating Schreiber and relocated to New York City. The pair announced this past September that they were separating as a couple after 11 years. “We are in a good place,” she says of their relationship now. “We’re very close friends, and we’re raising two beautiful boys.”
Despite her many years in America, Watts holds on to some key parts of her past—like her humor, which she says is definitely English. “I feel like it can be quite crass,” she says with a smirk. “And then I have that British self-deprecating thing, constantly apologizing. I’m not good at self-confidence, which is a very American trait.”
Her years in Australia gave her a tendency toward being open, honest and frank. “Australians wear their hearts on their sleeve; they’re very open and down-to-earth.” Yet in most of her roles, she plays an American. As convincing as her accent always is, she admits she still struggles with it.
The hardest part, she says, is nailing the r sounds.
“Sometimes I overcompensate; we don’t do the hard r’s. And that’s the one that Kai, my son, always busts me on. He’s like, ‘Mom, it’s not arrrrr!’”
Bikini Beginnings
Even today, Watts likes to do a few weeks of prep on her accent for a part before she gets to set. “I was talking to Nicole about it. We were saying, ‘Why doesn’t it get any easier? It almost gets harder. How is that possible?’”

Watts and Nicole Kidman (Mark Davis/Getty Images for Women in Film)
“Nicole” is fellow Aussie actress and friend Nicole Kidman, who’s had a big year herself, first with the film Lion and then the HBO series Big Little Lies. Watts and Kidman met while the two were auditioning for a TV commercial together early in their careers—both clad in bikinis for the part.
“We’ve kind of known each other for 30 years now,” Watts says. “We still always check in and spend as much time together as we can when we’re in the same city, and we just take off where we left off.”
Looking toward her next project, Watts is open. “The big thing I wanna do is theater,” she says. Broadway makes the most sense for her since she’s living in New York, “although I’ve heard, you know, it’s much scarier in New York. I’d love to do London.” She’s shyer than you might think. “I am terrified. I’m not good in front of live audiences.”
And as she keeps her eyes open for the right project onstage, she looks forward to seeing her other upcoming projects onscreen. On June 30, she’ll star in Gypsy, a new TV drama for Netflix, playing a therapist who delves too deeply into her patients’ lives. She’s also in Showtime’s new Twin Peaks series—in a role shrouded in secrecy. She’s excited about her dive into the world of high-quality television.
“I love that there’s all this room for female-driven stories,” she says. “It’s a great time for women—all the fantastically complicated women. TV’s not afraid of it.”
She’ll be joining Brie Larson in the big-screen film adaption of the book The Glass Castle, set for release August 11.
She loves working, but she’s never been good at sitting back as an audience member and watching her own work.
“I’ve never gotten used to that,” she says. Much like a parent who has to lead her children into the world and then release them—to walk alone to school one day and on toward life—she feels the same way about the roles she takes on.
“You never feel it’s finished,” she says. “It’s hard to let go.”

In “Gypsy,” coming to Netflix on June 30, Naomi Watts plays Jean Halloway, a New York City therapist with a cute daughter (Maren Heary), a dashing husband (Billy Crudup), a picturesque home in the suburbs — and some serious middle-age angst. When she decides to track down Sidney (Sophie Cookson), a patient’s manipulative ex-girlfriend, things get, well, a little complicated. Created by Lisa Rubin and with select episodes directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, the psychological thriller is Watts’ first regular series role in two decades.
Were you looking to get into TV?
I really wasn’t. I saw Sam Taylor-Johnson out and about and she said, “I’m doing this thing. I’d love for you to read it.” Both my agents and managers read it and went, “You probably won’t want to do it.” But it’s a really fascinating pilot and I got really pulled into the story, the idea that you have this whole other life. What I love about it is it’s kind of a cautionary tale. This woman is living out the fantasies that we’re all capable of having.
What interested you in playing Jean?
If you’re saying yes to a TV show, you want it to be interesting and complicated and have somewhere to go. I think she’s at a point in her life where she’s feeling like she’s lost herself a bit, her true identity, and closed the door, perhaps, on an old side of herself that she didn’t really want to. Perhaps at a point in her life she needed saving and that’s when she moved to the suburbs and married well to a hot lawyer. And now she’s got a kid. Everything on paper looks great, but she needs and desires more.
Jean crosses a professional line pretty early on by tracking down Sidney. What is she thinking?
It starts out with pure intentions. She really does want to help her patient. Then she connects with this woman in a way that reminds her of a lost part of herself. The exploration of one’s identity and the reshaping of it is an endlessly fascinating topic for me. I grew up like that, someone who went to many different schools and moved around within England and then to Australia. I felt like I was having to reinvent myself often just to fit in at school.
It’s interesting because this is the kind of midlife crisis story we usually see about men.
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. Women still have desires and women still seek power. Unfortunately, when those stories are told, the women are always crazy or ugly for seeking power. She’s definitely struggling with her sanity at times, but she’s not crazy. She’s a flawed and complex character. It’s great that those kind of roles are available now.
This is your first regular series role in nearly 20 years, and you’re in nearly every scene. I imagine it was grueling.
It kicked my ass. I’m used to working on a movie where you often have six weeks’ preparation with all the material, and in this case I didn’t have all the material. But as actors, so much of the way we work is sitting around waiting, and you can lose energy in that regard. Also, I’m working with a dialect, which is a whole other thing. I don’t think people realize how much work goes into that.
You do a very convincing American accent, though.
I feel robotic. I don’t feel free, which is really hard. You rehearse it so much in your head, it sort of becomes programmed in the right way to make it sound. So then if you want to play things differently, it’s very difficult.
Speaking of TV, you’re also in “Twin Peaks.” You knew I was going to ask, didn’t you?
Yes, of course, everyone’s asking. I love being on yet another set with David Lynch, who’s just such an incredible person, so unique, and I feel very connected to him. You just learn so much and it’s such a happy, memorable experience. But I’ve been sworn to absolute secrecy. And it’s not even like I can tell you many secrets because a lot of the time I didn’t know. I never read the whole script. In fact, there were certain scenes that I was in that lines said by other people were scrubbed out.
There are themes in “Gypsy: that are reminiscent of “Mullholland Drive.”
Yes — the duality. We all have things in our lives that we’re interested in. Identity is definitely one for me and it makes sense, because as I said, I grew up moving a lot as a kid. I kept thinking, “Oh, who should I be? Who do they want me to be? I wish I was her.” Those things occurred to me at a very young age, and they didn’t go away, as hard as that is to admit. It’s still in me.

David Lynch loves women. They are at the center of nearly all his films—from Blue Velvet to Mulholland Drive—and his groundbreaking TV series, Twin Peaks, which premiered in 1990 and is set to return on Showtime on May 21, with 18 new episodes, all directed by Lynch.

“Who killed Laura Palmer?” provided the motivating plotline for Twin Peaks, but the investigation into the mysterious disappearance of the beautiful high school student really served as an entrée into a dark and fascinating Lynchian reality. The world according to David Lynch is vaguely retro (his women often dress like 1950s starlets); consistently eerie (there is strangeness lurking around every corner); and oddly wholesome (coffee and pie are always present). He is the master of the juxtaposition of the creepy and the sweet, the sexual and the chaste. And at the heart of this tense, intriguing friction, you will always find Lynch’s women.

Interestingly, the director doesn’t seem to believe in auditions. Instead of hearing an actress read a part, he will simply review photographs of her and then decide whether or not he wants to meet her for a chat. “David will look at three or four, or maybe five, different pictures and say, ‘Okay, I’ll see those girls,’ ” recalled Naomi Watts, who was cast by Lynch for his 2001 neo-noir mystery, Mulholland Drive—the film that made her a star. “If you’re the third person on the list and he’s had a great meeting, he doesn’t meet girl number four or five. So my getting the part felt like fate.”

It’s often only after he casts an actress that he allows her to see the script. Sometimes, he merely describes the character she’ll be playing. “You usually have to read the script in the office,” said Laura Dern, who, having starred in four Lynch projects, including Wild at Heart (1990) and Inland Empire (2006), seems to have achieved muse status. “I’m always excited and surprised by what he asks me to play. Even in the beginning, I signed on because of David. He inspires that trust.”

Lynch’s heroines tend to have distinct, dual personalities (twin peaks, if you will): They are possessed of a prim, decorous side and an extreme sexuality that often attracts bizarre male suitors. “The sex in his films is emotional,” Watts said. “It is not gratuitous. You feel that he is getting at something primal.”
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While directing the more intense scenes, Lynch can be uncommonly present. “Wild at Heart was such an intimate movie that he was usually sitting on the bed while we were doing our love scenes,” Dern recalled. “We would get the giggles, and he’d pinch our feet to get us to stop laughing. He was always right there. As we were rolling, he would be able to somehow whisper in my ear, and then go back and hide.”
Like a doting parent, Lynch gives his actresses nicknames: Watts is Buttercup; Patricia Arquette, who starred in Lost Highway (1997), is Solid Gold; and Dern has been Tidbit since she was 16, when Lynch cast her in Blue Velvet. Actresses Hailey Gates (who hosts the Viceland TV series States of Undress) and Chrysta Bell (who is also a musician) are both in the reboot of Twin Peaks, and have yet to be rechristened. Their roles—just like the show itself—remain shrouded in secrecy.

“I can’t tell you much,” Dern said. “But I can tell you that Naomi and I went to his house for coffee and he told us he was cooking something up.”

There is no question, however, that the new Twin Peaks will retain the surreal, dreamlike quality that made the original so addictive—something the artist Alex Prager tapped into in creating her homage to Lynch and his incredible coterie of women.

June was once a celebrated counter-culture figure, but that was a decade ago. She now lives alone in her South Bronx apartment, having all but cut herself off from the outside world. It's the notorious "Summer of Sam" and June only has to look out of her window to see the violence escalating with the brutal summer heat. The city is on a knife's edge, a pressure-cooker about to explode into the incendiary 1977 New York blackout riots.